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USPS' federal ID exchange will run on HP Enterprise Cloud

By Rutrell Yasin

Oct 03, 2013

The federal online identity exchange being tested by the U.S. Postal Service and six other agencies will run on Hewlett Packard’s Enterprise Cloud Services, a cloud infrastructure platform that has received FedRAMP authorization, company officials reported.

The Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCCX) will be a federated identity management hub that will let agencies accept online credentials issued by trusted third parties. The goal is to offload from agencies the burden of managing usernames and passwords and allow citizens to use log-in credentials that have been issued by another organization they already do business with. In August, USPS selected SecureKey Technologies to provide a cloud-based platform for the pilot.

And this week, SecureKey selected HP as a subcontractor to provide cloud services for the new authentication infrastructure, hosting SecureKey's briidge.net Exchange for the implementation of FCCX.

As part of the HP Converged Cloud portfolio, HP Enterprise Cloud Services provides the benefits of a pay-as-you-use infrastructure without sacrificing the security required for mission-critical workloads, company officials said. In June, HP officials announced that HP Enterprise Cloud Services had been granted provisional approval to offer cloud services under the FedRAMP security program.

FedRAMP provides a standard approach for security assessment, authorization and continuous monitoring of cloud products and services. Vendors look to partner with cloud service providers that have FedRAMP authorization because all cloud products and services used by federal agencies will have to comply with the program’s security requirements by June 2014. To date, nine cloud providers have been granted either provisional or agency authority to operate under the FedRAMP program, including Akamai, Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Autonomic Resources, CGI Federal, HP, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft and The Agriculture Department’s National Information Technology Center.